College Grads Expand Lead in Job Security

GARY, Ind.—Fifteen years after high school, the working lives of Tremell Sinclair and Phyllis Sellars have evolved very differently, largely because of a single decision.

Ms. Sellars went to college; Mr. Sinclair didn't.

That decision has always shaped their economic prospects, but never more so than during the recent recession: Ms. Sellars kept her white-collar job, recently landing a pay raise, while Mr. Sinclair was laid off from his forklift driving job last year and only just found a new one—at a 46% lower salary.

ENLARGE

Tremell Sinclair, right, a former forklift driver, finally found work after a long search, but at a much lower wage than before. He and son, Tremell Jr., at a high-school reunion in Gary, Ind.
Paul Octavious for the Wall Street Journal

The classmates illustrate a divide between the fortunes of Americans with college degrees and those without. It's not only that the college educated earn more, but that they are far more likely to keep their jobs when times get tough.

By some measures, recession has exacerbated the divide. The unemployment rate for workers 25-and-older with a bachelor's degree or higher was 4.6% in August, for example, compared with 10.3% for those with just a high-school diploma. That's a 5.7-percentage-point gap, compared with a gap of only 2.6 percentage points in December 2007 when the recession began.

Laid-off college graduates are also finding work faster. Their median duration of unemployment was 18.4 weeks as of August, compared with 27.5 weeks for high-school grads. Three years ago, that figure was roughly the same for both groups—9.5 weeks and 9.6, respectively. And among the worst-off 25-and-older workers, the 5.2 million who have been out of work six months or more, only 19% are those who graduated from college, even though that group makes up a third of the work force.

Yet because college is increasingly expensive and doesn't guarantee a good job at a good wage, skepticism about the value of college is rising, even as the government pours more money into helping people get degrees. As part of the health-care legislation passed in March, Congress approved a student-loan overhaul that replaces private lenders with the federal Department of Education and redirects some $60 billion to community colleges and programs such as Pell Grants, which are college loans for the needy.

To economists who look at the numbers, college is a necessary, even if not sufficient, ticket to the middle class. "We are experiencing a period of shared misery, where workers at all education levels are struggling, including those with a college degree," says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. Still, he says, "It is certainly evident that those with college educations are faring much better than those with less education."

Not that a diploma is the slam-dunk it once was. It no longer guarantees a wage that rises faster than inflation. And while people with four-year college degrees make, on average, 64% more than those with only high-school degrees, that wage premium hasn't climbed much since 2001, after rising sharply for two decades.

Meantime, the unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher, though lower than others', is the highest it has been since comparable data begin in 1979, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute. Even in the early 1980s recession, when national unemployment hit 10.8%, the rate for people with college degree or higher never eclipsed 3.9%.

ENLARGE

College tuition has also grown faster than the rate of inflation for more than two decades, including a 6% increase in 2009—a period when overall prices fell. Some 64% of Americans thought college was a good investment in July, down from 79% a year earlier, according to a telephone poll of 3,000 individuals conducted in July for Country Financial, a Bloomington, Ill., financial-services company.

In Gary, many still see college as a ticket out of town. The predominantly African-American city sits on the tip of Lake Michigan, just outside Chicago. The city was named for a founder of United States Steel Corp., Elbert Gary, and steel remains the biggest private industry. But over the decades, Gary has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs.

At a recent reunion picnic for West Side High's class of 1995, the school's orange-and-blue colors were everywhere, coloring tablecloths, balloons and even the shoelaces of Shantel Douglas, the reunion's primary organizer. The recession has hit almost everyone, she says, which is why she made it a "recession friendly" weekend. Instead of in a restaurant or hall, she held the picnic on the worn playing fields behind the school. The school let them gather there for free.

Ms. Sellars, 33, says she still feels tightly connected to her alma mater. Raised by a single mother, she says the industrial decline she saw growing up made her determined to get an education. She studied hard and gravitated toward friends also bound for college. Mr. Sinclair was part of her high school group of friends and on occasion she has gone to dinner with him on visits to Gary.

Lately, though, she says, the two haven't spoken as frequently, in part because she is so busy at work. "I'm busy and have a high-stress job," she says.

After West Side, Ms. Sellars majored in sociology at Indiana University. After graduation she went to work at Covance Inc., which is based in Princeton, N.J., but has facilities in Indianapolis. Her first job with the company, which runs clinical-drug trials, was editing company manuals.

Ms. Sellars worked her way up through progressively better jobs. In January was promoted to supervisor in a division that receives samples sent in for processing. She bought a condominium in 2004, and shares responsibility for overseeing 52 employees.

"I knew if I didn't go to college, I wouldn't have had a chance," she says.

Mr. Sinclair, 34, says he thought about going to college, too. But his mother couldn't afford to send him. Instead, he got a $12-per-hour job operating heavy equipment after he graduated. Over the years he worked his way up through a series of blue-collar jobs, topping out at $24 per hour driving a forklift.

But then last summer, just before his high-school class began planning its 15-year reunion, he got laid off. He spent a year seeking work as a heavy-equipment operator, and also in retail stores. He says he got a callback from Menards, but didn't pursue it after he learned that job paid less than his unemployment checks.

Mr. Sinclair says he recently found another forklift job. But it doesn't start until October and pays only $13 an hour, about as much as he was making just after he graduated.

To keep costs low during his unemployment, he cut out cable television and restaurant meals. Instead of paying for the reunion barbeque, Mr. Sinclair set up a backyard grill in the parking lot, where he cooked chicken wings he'd brought from home in a plastic bag sealed tight with marinade. "It's rough," he said as he turned the wings over with tongs.

Workers like Mr. Sinclair were losing ground relative to their college-educated counterparts long before the recession. Workers with a college degree or more saw inflation-adjusted hourly earnings grow 20%, on average, between 1979 and 2007, while those with graduate and professional degrees saw a 31% rise, according to an analysis of government data by David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earnings for workers with a high-school diploma fell over that period.

That actually understates the case, Prof. Autor adds, because degree-holders generally have jobs with better health-care and retirement benefits.

Despite this, the recession has sharpened a longstanding debate about the value of a college degree. For Brandon Fleming, another 1995 West Side graduate, the burden of college debt loads, coupled with stagnant wages, has made him question whether it was worth getting his diploma.

He attended Kentucky State University and today is a compliance analyst at an insurance company in Indianapolis. He makes just under $40,000 a year, almost as much as he had in loans for college and an MBA degree. "I wouldn't tell someone not to go to college," he said as he ate his reunion lunch behind his old high school. "But they have to go in with the proper expectations, and I didn't understand that."

His classmate, Rick "Big Rick" Castillo, went to a technical college but dropped out after a year to work at a local steel mill. Now he makes $58,000 annually, enough to afford things like the shiny Ninja motorcycle he rode to the reunion. "It's one of the better jobs in the area," he says.

Today, with unemployment at 9.6% and 15 million people looking for work, employers are receiving a flood of resumes from college-educated workers who might not have applied for jobs that require less education when times were better. That's another obstacle to applicants with less education.

Ms. Sellars has seen this up close. The employees she oversees aren't required to have college degrees, though some do. Recently, the company has seen a spike in applications from candidates with bachelor's degrees, says Deborah Tanner, a senior vice president at Covance.

"We have probably hired more degreed people [in Ms. Sellars' unit] that we had in the past," says Ms. Tanner. "What the recession has done is broadened the talent pool."

I am still on and off working on my college degree (Business Admin) even though I make 130K or so a year as a Director of Software Development. College is good. Technical skills are even better. I start programmers at 45K and I barely cared where they went to school or if they graduated.

KSU + MBA = ~$100k, definitely not $40K. That says more about that guy than the current economic condition. What was the point of this story? You need at least a college degree in my generation just like you needed a HS diploma in my parents generation. Next you'll need a master's. Just wish we could get our public schools up to snuff so that poorer people could actually keep up.

Reading the article, what struck me was the implied dependence of all individuals on some nameless third party to provide a job. Some landed good jobs, some inadequate jobs, and some, no job at all. But no one thought to create their own job, or seemed to recognize this as a possiblity, much less as potentially the most rewarding job of all. The list of highly successful, self-employed individuals who have no college degree is a very long one indeed.

There is no job security! I'm sure it's statistically proven, but college and a good job was supposed to help protect you from downturns, but with the recession and the collapse of the housing market, not ONLY the guys with the hammers got laid off, but all the engineers, etc. who designed the subdivision, the commercial development down the road, etc.I'm finally doing what I should have done years ago and take control of my life with a part-time home based business. Now, future downturns won't have quite the impact they did...http://JonRPatrick.com

Reinventing is what I would like to call it, because a lot of companies are now looking for multi-tasking employees for a stronger valuabilty. Your making it harder for the company to fire you for an accidental technicality.

Republicans are only in favor of supporting higher education so long as big banks and hedge-funds can make the loans to students.

Once Obama got big banks and hedge funds out of the student loan industry there were so many articles and comments in the WSJ that a college education was meaningless and just a way for democrats to "indoctrinate" the young.

What a joke. Tell that to the thousands of conservative professors and universities and private colleges out there.

Of course supporting college education is against the TEA PARTY/ General Mao Cultural Revolution. What we need is "common sense" not uppity educated people. Heaven forbid someone gets a masters or a doctorate degree. They are banned from the Republican Party for being smarty pants.

If you wish to succeed in your career, you must first receive a college degree. It's always best to go to a top 50 school to even be considered a candidate for job these days.

For almost ten years now, C2 Education has been helping students across the country raise their GPAs and master the SAT through individualized instruction, and when it comes to individualized test preparation programs, C2 is in fact the nationwide leader in providing such services.

C2’s highly researched learning system is the first to fully assesses a both a student’s academic needs and his or her relative mastery of study skills. With this information, C2’s instructors are able to tailor a different curriculum to each individual student’s needs. At C2 we instruct our students until they have mastered the materials. In this way, each and every student is guaranteed to experience results.

I am very happy to say that The University of Florida FOR ME has been the greatest university in the world. Here's why: Follow the 2 routes--

1. My friend Sal went to Duke university as an undergrad--took out over 80k in student loans--and he's still a close friend today--but went to Harvard Law school thereafter, Cost: 150k (after aid over 3 years). Total Debt Paid (with interest): A little over 300k--finally, he's getting married now.2. My route: I went to the University of Florida--met some great professors and always wanted to start a business--now I run a Private equity firm with over 50 associates. And, I love my job--we hire top talent from Duke and Wharton, but I know at the end of the day--my net worth is higher than my firends and alot others who went towards the Ivy Leauge/Top-25 school route.

Schools only help you--most Americans work hard--but not to the point where they love their career so much to take the extra initiaitve--I DO and that's why I have 4 oceanfront properties now compared to my friend's only 1! Haha! Work Hard = A Winner!

In 2010 if you are making less than $40K a year you are sucking pond water. Heck I could barely make in on $60K. You have way over qualified people working deadend W2 jobs. The old system of go to school, get a good job, retire is totally dead. You have to stop making money for others and add value to the world by making money for yourself. 1.1 Million people have flat out given up on looking for a job. 15 Million still out of work. If you are smart, hungry and tired of the BS then look in the mirror.. You are the answer.

Let's face it. The problem with education is that you have a very large segment of the population in this country that has come to live with mediocrity, and find it to be a preferred way of life. Many of these people didn't need a degree, or even a high-school diploma to get where they are. They just got hurt, or had a child, or learned to work the system. Sure, these people- the welfare class, they don't live great. But they have all the free time in the world, cash, food, and a roof over their head, so they don't really mind. They impart these values... or the lack thereof, to their children, and take no interest in helping them with their homework, projects, etc., thus guaranteeing another welfare class for future generations.

Bear in mind, before the welfare era... everybody wanted their kids to go to school, to graduate. It was a symbol of pride, and parents rode their kids hard to attain it. The only thing that would stop kids from graduating is if they needed to work to support their family.

This is a good reminder about the widening education/employment gap, but it is not new information. I find it interesting that the focus of the article was in an African-Amercian community and yet the alarming recent statistic that the 2007/2008 high school graduation rate of Black males in the U.S. was only 47% was not mentioned. This statistic accounts, in part, for the dismal poverty numbers for African-American's in this country, as well as the overall 14.3% rate recently announced. As Confucius said "In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." One can argue which our government is, but the fact remains we must invest in education to have a population that is employable - above the poverty level.

It's merely credentialism. Employers prefer to hire the candidate with the credential. College education is good for the person with the degree (assuming he or she doens't have so much student loan debt that it cancels out the benefit), but too much education is bad for the nation as a whole; college graduates are just taking jobs that used to be done by high school graduates in the past.

A college education has always been helpful as long as the graduate was aimed at a career with a future. It has never made sense to spend a $100,000 or more on a field of study that didn't offer a good prospect of being able to pay it back (social work, etc.) But it's not really about a "college degree" as much as it is about needed skills. If forklift drivers are not in demand or there are more than are needed given a current volume of business activity, the road ahead for a forklift drive is pretty clearclear. On the other hand, if you're a college graduate who went with an employer who has spent a bundle training you to do a job not everyone coming through the door can do, the road ahead looks better. But this is nothing new. This has been realized by anyone who bothered to look....forever? It's called Economics 101 and 102, as in "supply and demand"?

Because of the massive fraud in our Public Schools, a High School diploma is virtually worthless. A Bachelors degree is the new High School diploma. Secondly, only a fool would think that either college, trade school, or some other form of specialized job training does not translate into better pay, more stable employment and job opportunites not otherwise available.

During my undergraduate days I had to work evenings loading trucks, and then take calc classes in the morning. A year or two if this did nothing for my grades so I joined the army ( this was during Viet Nam ). I got to see the world and when I was finished I got the GI BIll, finished my undergraduate and graduate degrees without any debt. To be sure the end could have been very different, I could quite easily have been killed. But the fates smiled and I got through without a scratch. Bottom line, when confronted with a large education tab think of the military.

One of the reasons graduates earn more is that graduates tend to come from stable and/or middle class families, and these sort of youngsters tend to earn more regardless of whether they go to university or not. When looking at studies that claim to show that graduates earn more, be very careful. Many of these studies do not control for family background and are thus not worth the paper they are printed on.

The only study I know of which DOES control for family background showed that science and vocational degrees DO pay for themselves. Arts degrees for women pay for themselves. But arts degrees for men do not.

It is a scandal that academics get away with churning out stuff that is not worth the paper it is printed on. But they do.

I'm curious to know why the article is written with a hint of disapproval as though this is a sad state of affairs. So too are the comments. College education is a filtering utensil for employers. Those that graduate demonstrate their ability to learn and to do so effectively. Not to mention the motivation it requires. The first several months of most jobs is training. Wouldn't we want people with this ability leading our workforce as opposed to people who just barely made out of high school or even worse those with little skill joining unions and demanding a written work order plus overtime compensation just for tying their shoe?

People like Rick "Big Rick" Castillo have no business making $58,000 in a steel mill while Brandon Fleming, who has a bachelors and masters degrees, makes $40,000. Why doesn't anyone ever point this out? Unions are one of the main reason why we have lost so many jobs that will never return. Why does a person who has so few real skills deserve to make so much money? People can tout the greed of corporations all they want and will be right, but we cant forget the greed of someone who stands in an assembly line stamping screws into a piece of metal all day and expects to make 50K a year. If unions weren't so greedy, many jobs might still be here.I realize that this isn't the point of the article and I will address that here. I have a BS and an MBA from a top tier university. My BS is basically a 36K piece of paper saying I should be considered for a job, and that's about it! My masters allowed me a 20K vacation from the work force while I got it and that's about it as well. Not that I would advise someone against education, but I would think hard about the cost and value of it, especially in the current and future job markets

Here we go again. College graduates have a lower unemployment rate than high school only graduates. Ergo, there is a cause and effect between a college degree and unemployment.

No such thing. The class of people going to college are completely dissimilar from those that stop at or before high school graduation. In the borough of Queens, Jamaican immigrants on average have a higher income than their Caucasian neighbors. Chalk something up to culture and motivation. (and yes I did make a leap without proper statistical analysis.)

In this economy you can get a college grad for high school rates. It's the easy approach and a feather in the manager's cap; until it becomes obvious that the degree in African languages doesn't cut it in waste management.

I think that what you say is correct. Nowhere else in the world can one still provide shelter, food, and some sort of semi-reliable vehicle for themselves with as little education and effort as our citizens do. Such a life style is certainly not bliss, but stomachs aren't empty, cable is cheap, making kids is fun, and the resulting stress and headache free lives thus led are to some preferable to the daily toils required to climb to the top and excel.

The problem is that if you point things out as you did, you will be called elitist or a Marxist and told that you hold the "average person" in contempt. The fact that such people can easily be induced to vote based on irrational agendas, and I am referring to both sides of the political spectrum, can easily lead to our eventual decay as a global power. People that remain inert throughout their lives will have no qualms electing mediocre candidates to powerful positions. We are already seeing signs of such mentality all around us and I think that it will only get worse.

invest in education? gah, what are you, blind? We spend more on it than any other country. In fact, the amount of money spent on each student in inner-city schools far exceeds that spent on each student in suburban schools, so for you to argue that poverty is the problem is both shortsighted and misleading. The problem is that a lot of parents don't value education anymore, and they inevitably transfer that sentiment on to their kids.

Education is like money, you can give it to everybody, but whether they waste it, or spend it to better their lives- or save and invest it for the future- that decision rests solely with them. You can lead a student to school but you can't make them learn.

Two thirds of Americans don't even know how to interpret a weather forecast or where Iraq is on a map. We had a vice-presidential candidate that didn't read ANY publications (or books for that matter), we might have a presidential candidate that believes in magic protective underwear, there is going to be a shortage of doctors, tech/sci sector jobs are being lost to the Chinese and Indians constantly, high school drop out rates are at an all time and medieval ages high, yet you worry about too much education being a bad thing ?

We are far from being in danger due to over education. O'Donnell is in part scared to appear on news programs because she will probably be asked what her favorite book is, what she studied in "college", or how she plans to make half the country abstain from sex. Many of our current national politician/ heroes cannot form two coherent sentences, invent new words daily and barely have command of their native language, have a history of rolling down obscure backwoods church floors with snakes while faking seizures, or think that magic is real - no wonder that they are hailed as "from the people", "by the people", and "for the people".

We are quickly descending into obscurantism and ignorance and at this rate it won't be more than a few decades before we start burning "elitist" books and employing prayer and garlic potions to treat disease, make bridges safer, or get a shuttle in space. The only difference between us and those we are trying to "civilize" is that we drive trucks on a full stomach while they ride donkeys on an empty one. I don't think we are anywhere near the stage where we are so over educated that Physics or Math or Economics professors roam the malls looking for toilet cleanup jobs.

Got to agree with you there. Too much of something makes it worthless. In addition, the fact that virtually anybody can get a high school diploma whether they want it or not further devalues the thing. So, when universal college education comes around the pike, what do you think that will do to the value of a college degree?

I think that what you say is mostly true. But it is not so much that the value of a high school diploma has eroded, as the expectations for an employee have increased. When I graduated from high school, 40 years ago, the value of the education I received was commensurate with my skill set and earning power. Four years in the US Army motivated me to go on in school.

Greed entered and tainted the educational system. It is more profitable to keep someone in school 6 years versus 4 years on a tuition receipt basis alone. It is profitable for the schools and the student loan institutions to lie to someone and tell them that their worthless degree will indeed offer better opportunity: they will pay for books, classes, cafeteria food, parking, labs, and library fees forever, while discharging financial aid in bankruptcies is not doable. Many profit from such state of affairs except the student, of course. But then that never bothered those looking at short term investment returns.

...it's also a 4-year endurance test, especially in science and engineering. For many employers, you cannot, due to the law or from fear of lawsuits, discriminate based on perceived intelligence; you cannot ask for an IQ test, for example.

However, it is perfectly legal for universities to discriminate against the stupid and unmotivated, so employers are happy to outsource that filter to universities.

This reminds me of a conversation I had at a bar in LAX a few weeks back. This 35 year-old dude, high school dropout, was heading out to pick up his kicks from his wacko ex-wife. Told me "I need a job, man". The only qualification he offered was "loyalty". I said, "dude, sorry but there's not much I can do for you, unless you're an electrical engineer or have some electronics tech training from the Navy or similar".

So they can do what with it? Intellectual capacity is not necessarily tied to economic means to even consider going to college. With the economy the way it is, going on to college is going to be even harder for some families as they find they are having to worry about their retirement and other life circumstances.

A college degree has become a means to discriminate; today's job search engines (i.e. monster) can be configured to screen out resumes that do not indicated secondary education. If someone has 20 years experience in a field but no college degree, they are excluded before even being considered.

lucas: I don't really think the problem belies in the fact that a guy making 60k vice 3 guys making 20k make a difference. I will tell you, 3 guys making 20k will not buy 1 car at 25k, but it's definately in the price range of the 60k salary. You of all people should know this! It's a little different when you get the corporate rice bowls involved however.

My point on the 'no output' was a little bit extreme, but remove production from any good corporation and you'll instantly have a non-productive corpo. Remove management and overhead from any good corporation and you'll still have some productivity (perhaps not maximized).

The best example of these 4 yr degrees at best providing the least direct, tangible boon to productivity is Information management or IT. Yet we pay 1 IT guy around 50k for what?? Do you think HE had 1 second of that bolt turning? IT dept are sorta like the war on terror: The risks will always be there but you never want to be the one stuck holding the bag when something happends after a budget cut. IT also tends to only support the white-collar level of corporations, so it's almost a self-licking icecream cone.

Is there sheer dead weight in production? You bet...but look at the age of those making 60k/yr. I'd also be willing to wager there's a marked increase in productivity per worker when there are layoffs to 'purge' that dead weight. If you cut those people's wages or expect them to earn less, we can only brace for further deflation.

The 'corporate' mentality in this country is astounding when you sit and think it's not the unions sucking us dry, it's overhead and administration; lead by example I always say, management should take twice the paycut(or benefits) as their workers. Anyone who doesn't appreciate a skilled laborer is someone very naive. And if every(even a large minority of) factory worker is making 60k/yr turning bolts coming off the streets, then my argument is null and void and we have a VERY VERY big collapse in the making.

The guy 'turning the bolt that an 8 year old can do'...does it for 60k to 80k because people pay 20 to 25k for a vehicle. I fail to see how Unions distort the market on this, as this is a pretty darn good business model that Mr. Ford prided himself on.

The issue at hand is the BS in business managements that EXPECT a managerial/administrator's role at anymore than 20 to 30k a year for no sunstantial output. Nobody wants to actually do vocational work, and thus the marketplace has risen the wages of said payscales. Go to any heavy industrial complex outside of the car manufacturers. I bet they're STILL hiring...nobody wants to do the backbreak work.

Pregnant statement! Pop culture is not an educated culture. The stoic, austere and religious Amish have virtually no STDs, divorce, unwanted pregnancies, high levels of heart disease or cancer, abuse of government services and so on. A culture that is easily fixated on Lindsay Lohan only reflects its level of respect for education.

I have to agree with you there. As an African American who is not part of the monolith I see there are many aspects black culture that will only perpetuates poverty. Unfortunately poverty has become an industry and there are many African American "leaders" who profit from keeping us poor and uneducated. Well meaning progressives only perpetuate the problem. Culture is not sacred! I want to see a African American nobel prize winner in physics, biology or chemistry in my lifetime. We need a black Einstein not Jayzee or Kobe, or Oprah!

false unless you happen to be female. affirmative action gives everyone a leg up on us white males. Assuming you arn't an untouchable (white male) it is money that most determines ones status and upward mobility, money and the connections that go with it. If the true goal was racial eqauality then affirmative action either would not exist or it would be color blind and tied to socioeconomic status i.e. a person who takes the time to get an education but has no ties into their target industry becouse they were the first in their family to get an education would get a slight leg up on those whos parents allready work in the industry. Being a white male certainly hasn't helped my job search. Bachelors of science in business administration respectable GPA and hundreds of resumes have only yeilded 3 interveiws and a job in security. If this is white privilage i would hate to see what punishment would be like if the ale sharpton types got their way.

Tell him to join an apprenticeship at a shipyard...They need loyal electricians.

There's a very very scary skills gap in the country and it's gonna hit the engineering and management types very shortly. On the one hand you have people that do 'landscaping' on the other you have those with parchment in highly technical degrees. Mid-level skilled laborers are rather difficult to come by now.

This country suffers from too many chiefs, not enough indians, syndrome.

God..the more you write the more you show your poor understanding of corporate workplaces. You must be in one of the industries that employs labor union members at hyperinflated salaries.

First, I am in IT and you obviously are clueless to the value, security, and service this department can provide. On a base level, the breakdown of IT systems (say a database or even a network connection) for a company can bring business activity to a complete halt. On the opposite end, IT services can automate processes and eliminate manual and repetitive work, saving thousands of man hours and even improving the consumer experience for a customer. What are the C-level employees that you know the titles of? CEO, CFO, and CIO. So, obviously IT is a pretty important part of a company.

Second, administration and overhead is sucking us dry??? what does that even mean? Productivity is at an all time high, so it seems to me that business administration does a pretty good job of keeping overhead down. I wont say that companies aren't wasteful, but they pale in comparison to the waste of federal government.

Third, I don't agree that we are talking about skilled laborers here. Factory workers who turn a bolt are NOT skilled no matter how you play it. Their job is menial, takes no education, and could be done by almost anyone. And yeah, maybe not a lot are making 60K. But most are making around 50K and that is WAY too much for the value they create.

Why should someone who didn't go to school or work hard early in life be able to make so much money? I still owe 36K in student loans and I have been paying on them for 6 years now. I spent 6.5 years in school getting a BS and MBA. And you are going to tell me that some guy who has a GED deserves to make the same as I do at his menial job???

Please....it is people with attitudes like yours that got obama elected and are sending this country down the slippery slope to a European style socialism.

and you really think that because a factory worker had a minute part in a 25K car that they deserve 50-60K a year? That's fine, but you see why these jobs are going elsewhere.

And I don't know where you get that people with BS's expect to make 20-30k a year for no output? People in those positions provide WAY more value than the 40-50K they are paid. Obviously you have never worked in a corporate job.

I beg to differ. The problem is that the market isn't allowed to dictate the wages. No sane market would pay 60-80 K a year for some guy to screw a knob on some car door day in and out and then offer to pay for his pension, "hurt back", or send all his brood to college for free. No offense, these are jobs that can literally be performed by 8 year old kids. The market is distorted by Unions and other interests. And these Unions exist because at an earlier time the market did the opposite and gave people 3 buttons for 16 hours of hard toil. We need a happy balance and what we have now is not it.

you are naive if you think "the market" dictates Castillo's earnings; no market would pay someone so much for something that requires so little skill. I can't attest to Mr Fleming earnings, but I would bet his skill level and output far surpasses the value of a factory worker's unskilled contribution. As far as the online diploma mills, go get one if you are that worried about it. It wont be hard.

Actually, the Amish are quite adept and efficient home builders, with a better understanding of the geometry involved than one might imagine, and they value craftsmanship. They do use power tools, they simply can't own them. Between them and the Mennonites, it's tough for anyone else to win any home construction bids in south central PA. I wouldn't be surprised if the Amish built John and Kate plus eight's home.

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